The world needs to add about a billion homes to meet the demand for urban housing. An "incremental" approach, where the urban poor work with the government in constructing their own homes slowly over time, can help.

About one billion people live in slums or informal settlements. Thailand's Bann Mankong program, which improved the living conditions of more than 90,000 households at a cost of just $570 per family, offers lessons on solutions.

The Flint water crisis an example of what can happen in the absence of transparent, inclusive and accountable water quality regulation and public service delivery. And unfortunately, it's just one community out of many throughout the world experiencing this problem.

A Report on Scoping Activities in Six Countries

This working paper summarizes the results of scoping research conducted by WRI and its partners to assess capacity needs in six countries—Brazil, Colombia, Ethiopia, India, South Africa, and Thailand—related to greenhouse gas (GHG) measurement and performance tracking. The paper also identifies...

The authors discuss how energy stakeholders from utilities to government officials to consumers can learn from the Thai Solar PV Roadmap Initiative (TSRI), an initiative that aims to provide the Thai government with recommendations on how to both effectively and inclusively pursue greater solar power development.

Electricity production is central to climate change as it accounts for 20 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. Too often, electricity decisions are made through closed processes with little scrutiny.

WRI’s Electricity Governance Initiative (EGI) is a civil society partnership promoting better governance in the electricity sector. Transparent, accountable, and a participatory decision-making processes will, in time, produce better decisions. When Thailand was privatizing its power utility, a report by in-country partners using the WGI toolkit highlighted the lack of a strong regulatory body to balance the interests of the public against those of a private power utility. The Thai courts halted the privatization, referencing our analysis that the privatization did not prevent abuses of power.

Worldwide, one out of every five people lacks access to modern electricity. Affordability, quality of service, and social and environmental impacts pose great challenges in providing people with the power they need for lighting, cooking, and other activities. Good governance involving open and inclusive practices is essential to overcoming these pressing obstacles.

The situation worsened in 2003, when Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra set forth a plan to restructure Thailand’s electricity sector and privatize EGAT. Rather than improving Thailand’s electricity sector in the public interest, the plan for privatization was designed to increase capital for powerful stakeholders and upper management employees. It called to maintain EGAT’s unregulated monopoly in order to maximize profits, even at the expense of public needs and environmental vulnerabilities.

Increased industrialization in Asia has created countless hurdles for communities to protect themselves from pollution. Important government information—such as the amount of pollutants being discharged by nearby factories or results from local air and water quality monitoring—still isn’t readily accessible in user-friendly formats. This practice often leaves the public entirely out of decision-making processes on issues like regulating pollution or expanding industrial factories. In many cases, the public lack the information they need to understand and shield themselves from harmful environmental, social, and health impacts.

This state of affairs recently prompted a group of government officials, NGOs, local community representatives, and academics to demand government action to change the status quo. Last week, representatives from China, Indonesia, Japan, Mongolia, the Philippines, and Thailand released the Jakarta Declaration for Strengthening the Right to Environmental Information for People and the Environment. The Declaration urges governments to improve access to information on air and water quality pollution in Asia—and offers a detailed road map on how to do so.